I have noticed that several of the non-Latin fonts we ship in Fedora
contain
partial hinting information, usually not covering (or covering only very
poorly) the intended target alphabet(s) of the fonts.
It is a common practice in so-called CJK regions.
This is a problem because the version of Freetype in Fedora 15 will
see that
there is some hinting bytecode and try to use the bytecode interpreter
rather than the autohinter on the entire font. If the relevant characters
are then not actually hinted, those characters will be entirely unhinted,
looking blurry.
Hmm. I didn't noticed it.
It is really a big problem. With very few exceptions, almost all CJK
fonts are *partically* hinted. (I'm not familiar with fonts for other
scripts, but I guess there are some more with similar situations.)
That means most of the CJK fonts will not work well in Fedora.
According to Freetype upstream, you should remove all hinting
bytecode from
the fonts if it's not complete.
Please go through your fonts, especially non-Latin fonts, looking for
hinting bytecode, and if it isn't anywhere near complete, please remove it
from the font.
It may be acceptable for a short term workaround, but I don't think it
is an appropriate solution. We could remove those partial hints from
all the Fedora distributed fonts, but we have no control over other
fonts; there are many free or commercial CJK fonts other than those
packaged in Fedora, that are partially hinted. If we go you-should-
remove-all-partial-hints-if-you-want-to- use-it-on-Fedora direction,
Fedora users will be effectively unable to use those fonts, that IMHO
is not a good idea.
What happens if I propose Fedora to simply exclude those bytecode
support in Fedora distribution of FreeType, as in the past?